Thursday Poem - At the road's turning, a sign

Stranger, you have reached a fabulous land―
in winter, the abode of swans,

magnolia buds and black leaves

secretly feeding the earth―

memory snaked into tree roots.

In spring, you will feel life changes

bubble up in your blood like early wine,

and your heart will be lighter than

the flight of gossamer pollen.

Stranger, in summer, you will drink deeply

of a curious local wine,

fortified with herbs cut with a silver knife

when the moon was new.

Who knows what freedoms

will dazzle your path like fireflies?

And I promise you, in the fall

you will give up the search and know peace

in the fragrance of apple wood burning.

You will learn how to accept love

in all its masks, and the universe

will sing here more sweetly than any other place

Dolores Stewart (Riccio) from The Nature of Things

Wordless Wednesday - Held

Hitching a Rosy Ride

Sequestered, Week 234 (CCXXXIV)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the world

There are ways in, journeys to the center of life, through time; through air, matter, dream and thought. The ways are not always mapped or charted, but sometimes being lost, if there is such a thing, is the sweetest place to be. And always, in this search, a person might find that she is already there, at the center of the world. It may be a broken world, but it is glorious nonetheless.

Linda Hogan, The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir

October in Tangerine and Teal

Friday Ramble - Hibernate

This week's offering hails from the Latin hībernātus, past participle of the verb hībernāre (to spend the winter) and the noun form hiems (snowstorm, winter). Both are related to the Greek cheimá (winter) and Sanskrit hima (cold, frost or snow). All of the above likely originated in the Proto Indo-European (PIE) root forms ghei-, ghi-, and ghimo- meaning snow or winter. Our word is kin to the mightiest mountains on earth, the Himalayas. The name of that range is a combination of the Sanskrit hima (snow) and alaya (abode), thus meaning "the abode of snow" in that language.

Most birds in the northern hemisphere migrate south for the winter, but other species of wildlife go dormant and sleep through the long white season. During this time, their body temperatures, metabolic rates, breathing and heartbeats slow down, and we refer to the process as hibernating or overwintering. Bears exhibit an elegant and impressive physiology as they hibernate through the winter in leaf-strewn dens. Squirrels, prairie dogs, groundhogs, bats and hedgehogs den up when outdoor temperatures fall, sleeping until temperatures rise. Northern frogs, toads, snakes and turtles are masters of the art of hibernation too.

Humans "do" hibernation too, and we do it in various ways. Some of us migrate to warmer climes to escape ice and snow and cold, but most of us simply withdraw from the outside world to warm dens of our own. Our protocols for getting through the long white season are highly personal. We retrieve shawls, sweaters and gloves from cedar chests, accumulate stacks of books, munchies and music. We kindle fires in fireplaces, pull the draperies closed and surround our winter selves with things that are warm, embracing, spicy and redolent of comfort. For me, mugs of tea and a favorite shawl in deep, earthy red are the right stuff.

I buy more cookbooks between now and spring, make endless pots of tea, cauldrons of soup and casseroles. I listen to classical music and good jazz, pose still life camera compositions on tables and window sills, pile up leaning towers of reading material. The books are usually hardcovers - there is something comforting about holding the real thing in one's hands, the cover art, the way the thick creamy paper feels, the smell of the ink, the illustrations and the typefaces. A beautifully designed book is a work of art, and I wish more of such things were published.

I can get totally caught up in the color of a morning cuppa, and I try to resist the temptation to add cinnamon sticks, anise stars and cardamom pods to anything I brew or stir up in the kitchen. From the depths of the pantry, the makings of fiery curries, vindaloos and silky kormas exert a sovereign tug at the senses that is difficult to ignore. It is almost impossible to pass trees, hedgerows and drifts of fallen leaves in the village without getting lost in their golds and reds and bronzes.

Hibernation also means wandering around with a camera and not staying indoors, trying to capture the light of the sun as it touches clouds, contrails and migrating geese, sparks across frost dappled fields, farm buildings and old rail fences. It's a meditative process holding out stillness and tantalizing glimpses of something wild, elusive and elemental. Ice, frost, snow and the paucity of light notwithstanding, it's all good, and something to be treasured. Every view is a wonder and no two images are ever the same, even when they were captured in exactly the same place.

Thursday Poem - This Time of Year

when the light leaves early, sun slipping down
behind the beech trees as easily as a spoon
of cherry cough syrup, four deer step delicately
up our path, just at the moment when the colors
shift, to eat fallen apples in the tall grass.
Great grey ghosts. If we steal outside in the dark,
we can hear them chew. A sudden movement,
they're gone, the whiteness of their tails
a burning afterimage. A hollow pumpkin moon rises,
turns the dried corn to chiaroscuro, shape and shadow;
the breath of the wind draws the leaves and stalks
like melancholy cellos. These days are songs, noon air
that flows like warm honey, the maple trees' glissando
of fat buttery leaves. The sun goes straight to the gut
like a slug of brandy, an eau-de-vie. Ochre October:
the sky, a blue dazzle, the grand finale of trees,
this spontaneous applause; when darkness falls
like a curtain, the last act, the passage of time,
that blue current; October, and the light leaves early,
our radiant hungers, all these golden losses.

Barbara Crooker, from Radiance

Wordless Wednesday - Fenced

Earth and Sky and Lake Together

The water is still, and trees along the far shore are cloaked in drifting fog that billows and swirls as though stirred by a vast, benign and blessing hand. Earth and water are warmer than the air, and the meeting of the three elements spins a pearly veil over everything in sight. Sunlight or autumn rain - either will disperse the fog, but there is rain in the cards for today, and clouds are already moving in. It will most likely be rain that lifts the veil.

Thanks to cold nights, ground frost and the scouring north wind, the countryside is morphing into its early winter configuration. There is still a wealth of color in the eastern Ontario highlands, but here and there, trees are bare on their slopes, and fallen leaves are ankle deep in the woods. Just out of sight in this photo, an old hawthorn has lost its leaves entirely and wears only a few frosted berries.

Also unseen is the scribe in wellies and warm jacket, carrying her blackthorn walking stick, a camera, lenses, pen and field notebook. Her collar is turned up against the wind, and she is wearing gloves. In one of her pockets is a flask of Darjeeling tea, and in another, biscuits for her companion, Beau. She can't wander as far as she used to, but wander she does by golly, every chance she gets.

Caught up in the fey ambiance of the scene before her, she thinks it would be even more magical with sunlight filtering through the lacy golden tamaracks on the other side of the lake and radiating through the fog to create voluminous shadows on the water. For all that, she is at peace and contented with what she sees. She was feeling rather lost when she got here, and in truth, she is still feeling a little lost, but paradoxically, she is also feeling at home.

Sequestered, Week 233 (CCXXXIII)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you'd think the mere fact of existing would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise. We are alive against the stupendous odds of genetics, infinitely outnumbered by all the alternates who might, except for luck, be in our places.

Even more astounding is our statistical improbability in physical terms. The normal, predictable state of matter throughout the universe is randomness, a relaxed sort of equilibrium, with atoms and their particles scattered around in an amorphous muddle. We, in brilliant contrast, are completely organized structures, squirming with information at every covalent bond. We make our living by catching electrons at the moment of their excitement by solar photons, swiping the energy released at the instant of each jump and storing it up in intricate loops for ourselves.

We violate probability, by our nature. To be able to do this systematically, and in such wild varieties of form, from viruses to whales, is extremely unlikely; to have sustained the effort successfully for the several billion years of our existence, without drifting back into randomness, was nearly a mathematical impossibility.

Add to this the biological improbability that makes each member of our own species unique. Everyone is one in 3 billion at the moment, which describes the odds. Each of us is a self-contained, free-standing individual, labeled by specific protein configurations at the surfaces of cells, identifiable by whorls of fingertip skin, maybe even by special medleys of fragrance. You'd think we'd never stop dancing.

Lewis Thomas,The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

Beech Mother Turning

Friday Ramble - Creeping Autumn

Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia)

Suddenly, there in the hedgerows on our morning walks are clear signals that seasonal changes are in the air. The persistent strands of Virginia creeper wrapping old wooden fences and stone walls and draping themselves around trees and shrubs were green a few days ago, and this morning many look more like Yuletide (or Christmas) paper, red and green and silvery in the early light. Where the stones and bricks to which they cling get direct sunlight during the day and retain their heat at night, the creepers cling to their greens a little longer, but they too are thinking about changing their colors.

Oak leaves are lightly touched with the splendid rosy bronze tint they wear in late September and early October before falling to earth, and beech leaves are already edged in coppery red and cognac. Leaf by leaf and branch by branch, maple trees in the eastern Ontario highlands are turning red.

One of my forestry references identifies native beeches as being of the species called simply "common beech". To my mind however, there is nothing common about the beeches on our hill with their majestic height, silvery bark, dense foliage and rounded crowns. They are simply magnificent.

Part of me wants to dance about and applaud the cooler temperatures and the burnished, glorious colors coming into their own. Another part of me, as much as I love Samhain (or Halloween) and the harvest season, is dismayed at the prospect of cold weather, long days and short nights, of an early autumn this time around. Fall should not arrive until the end of September at the very earliest, and then it ought to hang about until the end of November.

Please Mama, not yet........ Gift us with several more weeks of sun and warmth and gentle breezes, no ingathering and cold nights for a while longer.

Thursday Poem - Song for Autumn

In the deep fall
    don't you imagine the leaves think how 

comfortable it will be to touch
    the earth instead of the
nothingness of air and the endless
    freshets of wind? And don't you think
the trees themselves, especially those with mossy,

    warm caves, begin to think

of the birds that will come—six, a dozen—to sleep

    inside their bodies? And don't you hear

the goldenrod whispering goodbye,
    the everlasting being crowned with the first
tuffets of snow? The pond
    vanishes, and the white field over which
the fox runs so quickly brings out
    its blue shadows. And the wind pumps its
bellows. And at evening especially,
    the piled firewood shifts a little,
longing to be on its way.

Mary Oliver, from Devotions

Wordless Wednesday - Holding the Sky

Village, Scarlet and Bokeh

In the village, scarlets, plums and deep inky blues are creeping into view slowly, their emergence out of late summer's dusty greens motivated by cooler evenings and gently ruffling winds at nightfall. Autumn brings heavys dews, and when Beau and I potter off on early morning walks, there are glossy coins of dew everywhere. 

A small gasp of koi or nishikigoi (錦鯉, "brocaded carp") makes its home in the shaded pond underneath this Japanese maple. I didn't know until recently that a colony of koi is called a gasp, and that frill of interesting but trivial information has been tucked away in the old sconce for future reference. My neighbor's pond is fed by a waterfall, and the sound of the falling water is a pleasing music as we pass by on early walks. Beau and I visit the alcove until all the maple's leaves have fallen, and the waters below her gracefully arching branches are dusted with snow. There is a lovely, meditative stillness by the pond under the tree, in all seasons.

As often as I witness the turning of the seasons and the vivid entities coming into being, the autumn morphing of the village into deeper and more intense hues is always enchanting. It takes us (and the camera) by surprise each and every year. Such transformations are magics of a wilder kind, and it is difficult to imagine living this old life without being among them, without watching as they flare and swirl and dance, blithely remaking the world in stunning elemental colors.

Northern light dazzles the eyes and lingers lovingly on everything it encounters in its journey across the eastern Ontario highlands at this time of the year, and I wish I could paint everything it touches. Come to think of it, that is just what my lens is doing. All I do is hold the camera. Happy October!

Sequestered, Week 232 (CCXXXII)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

. . . I don't know what gladness is or where it comes from, this splitting open of the self. It takes me by surprise. Not an awareness of beauty and mystery, but beauty and mystery themselves, flooding into a mind suddenly without boundaries. Can this be gladness, to be lifted by that flood?

This is something that needs explaining, how light emerges from darkness, how comfort wells up from sorrow. The Earth holds every possibility inside it, and the mystery of transformation, one thing into another. This is the wildest comfort.

Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature

Bumble Girls in the Gold

Friday Ramble - Going for the Gold

It's the reds that grab our attention in late September and early October. When maple trees in the Lanark highlands turn, its gorges, hills and quiet coves are ablaze with color. Other trees are dazzling in their own right, but their earthier hues are always upstaged by the riotous, cavorting red maples.

There is an elemental chemistry at work in the woods. In summer, the green pigment in leaves (chlorophyll) helps converts sunlight into energy in the elegant chemical process called photosynthesis. (That word comes from the Greek phōs meaning "light", and suntíthēmi meaning "putting together".) Trees retain the carbon dioxide extracted during photosynthesis and use it to manufacture nourishment, together with water taken in through their roots. Oxygen extracted at the same time is released back into the earth's atmosphere for us to breathe. It's a wild and earthy magic of the very finest kind, trees and sentient beings all breathing in and out together and sharing the bounty of light. That there is magic is without question, and trees are sentient beings too, not just woody things with leaves and branches and roots.

When autumn arrives, deciduous trees withdraw into themselves. Chlorophyll production slows down, allowing the anthocyanin and carotenoid pigments also in leaves to come into their own. Leaves high in anthocyanins and low in carotenoids turn scarlet, and those with high levels of both flavinoids flash bright orange. Leaves high in carotenoids and low in anthocyanins do a sky dance in honeyed golds and yellows. Absent both anthocyanins and carotenoids, tannins rule, giving us the burnished russets, ochres, umbers and bronzes of the great oaks, hickories and beeches.

Like most northerners, I have a passion for scarlet, claret and ruby in autumn, but it always seems to me that the golds, bronzes and russets of our other native tree species don't get the attention they so richly deserve. The oro (gold) on display here in late September and early October is anything but pallido (pale or light). It dazzles the eye; it sings and struts and dances; it kicks up its heels. It rocks.

Poplars, ashes, elms and birches wear radiant saffron, and so do ginkgo trees in the village. Beech leaves are coppery coinage, and oak leaves turn an alluring rosy bronze. In Lanark, the aspens and tamaracks down by our beaver pond wear a delightful buttery gold. Nearby, late blooming goldenrod sways back and forth until it goes to seed and offers its fuzzy children to the wind. A few tenacious bumbles ride its plumes. Yellow daisies and hawkweed bloom in protected nooks among the rocks, and everywhere, there is fine contrast from spruces, pines and cedars in the background. An ambrosial, blue-green, evergreen fragrance fills the air.

And then there are all the smaller bright entities down on the forest floor among the fallen leaves. Eastern yellow fly agaric (Amanita muscaria) glows like a hundred watt bulb in the woods, and one can spot it in autumn as at no other time of the year. From the shadows, the lovely but poisonous fungus dishes out its frothy, studded golden incandescence like a halogen lamp set on high beam.

Here's to the glorious golds of the fall panoply. When the long white season arrives and snow covers the countryside, it is the golds that will turn up in my dreams. Long may they delight these old eyes in dazzling array.

Thursday Poem - Evening

The sky puts on the darkening blue coat

held for it by a row of ancient trees;

you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,

one journeying to heaven and one that falls;

and leave you not at home in either one,

not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,

not calling to eternity with the passion

of what becomes a star each night, and rises;

and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)

your life, with its immensity and fear,

so that, now bounded, now immeasurable,

it is alternately stone in you and star.

Rainer Maria Rilke

(translation by Stephen Mitchell)

Wordless Wednesday - Fallen Treasure

Taking the Sky Road Home

Only in September and October do sunsets like this come along, ground mist creeping through fields and around trees, light and sky and clouds like something out of a Maxfield Parrish painting. The clouds look like a trail one could walk along, and they remind me of the title I appended to another photo a few years ago, "Taking the Sky Road Home". My word, this almost looks like a painting.

Fog and ground mist are fine, spooky things and common at twilight in autumn, clouds of condensed moisture generated by the earth's slow breathing and drifting along, just above the surface. Humans are cloud-breathing dragons - we generate our own mists and fogs as we take air into our lungs and expel it again; trees breathe in and out too. As above so below, humans, sky, trees and the earth all breathing in and out together. We are one with the clouds drifting along above our heads and the nebulous stuff floating along below us. I find the notion pleasing, and I also like the idea of being a dragon, cloud-breathing or otherwise. 

We call visible murky stuff "fog" when it reduces visibility to less than 1,000 metres, "mist" when we can see further than 1,000 meters through it. There is a farm building in the distance, so this is mist rather than fog, and a right fine mist it is.

I might be anywhere in the world, but I am leaning against a fence in the eastern Ontario highlands on a cool night in September with the collar of my old corduroy jacket turned up against the wind. Beau and I watch as another day fades, and I take photo after photo, hoping one or two will turn out. The clouds, the setting sun, and the gauzy veils of condensation floating just above the field are too exquisite for words, so why on earth am I trying to describe them? 

The sun slides below the horizon, another autumn day folds up like an umbrella, and the stars come out. There is a moon up there somewhere, but she is waning and won't be visible until midnight. If we are awake, we will go outside and greet her.

Sequestered, Week 231 (CCXXXI)

Happy Autumn Equinox (Mabon)

Fence and Morning Light

Friday Ramble - For the Fall Equinox

It seems as though summer has just arrived, but here we are again, nearing the eve of the autumn equinox. Slightly cooler mornings, heavy dews and falling leaves after months of blistering heat and humidity, can it be?

The autumn equinox is often observed on September 21st, but the astronomical coordinate this year is the day after tomorrow, Sunday, September 22. Like all the old seasonal festivals, the observance begins at sundown on the night before, Saturday, September 21st. South of the equator, the natural cycles are reversed, and tomorrow is the eve of the vernal equinox (Ostara).

Whenever we choose to observe it, the fall equinox is a pivotal cosmic hinge, and it wears many names: Mabon, Harvest Home, Second Harvest, the Feast of Ingathering and Alban Elfed, to name just a few. Mabon is the most common of the bunch, a modern invention taken from the name of the god Mabon/Maponus, a male fertilizing principle in Welsh mythology. The American pagan Aidan Kelly devised the name in the seventies when he was crafting a calendar for modern pagans and noticed the fall equinox did not have a pagan name of its own. It seems to have stuck.

And so it goes...  Sunday's observance blends modern pagan practices with the rich traditions of ancient harvest festivals. Ceres, Demeter, John Barleycorn, Lugh or Persephone are other contenders for a tutelary deity presiding over autumn harvest rites, but I am rather fond of the "Great Son" of the Mabinogion, sometimes thought to be a companion of Arthur's Round Table.

In the old Teutonic calendar, the autumn equinox marked the beginning of the Winter Finding, a ceremonial interval lasting until Winter Night on October 15, also the date of the old Norse New Year. For moderns, the date marks the end of summer and the beginning of autumn. In Christian tradition, the day is associated with St. Michael the Archangel—his feast takes place a few days from now on September 25 and is known (for obvious reasons) as Michaelmas. The autumn blooming Michaelmas daisy or New England aster with its purple petals and golden heart is one of my favorite wildflowers, and I always looks forward to its blooming. 

The autumn equinox is about abundance and harvest, but most of all, it is about balance and equilibrium—it is one of two astronomical coordinates in the whole year when day and night are (or rather seem to be) perfectly balanced in length. Like all the old festivals dedicated to Mother Earth, it is a liminal or threshold time, for we are poised between two seasons, summer and autumn.

One holds out hopeful thoughts for the autumn equinox, that skies overhead will be brilliantly blue and full of singing geese by day, that trees and vines and creepers will be arrayed in crimson and gold, that a splendid golden moon will be visible against a blanket of stars by night. This year, the moon is slightly past full but no less beguiling for all that.

An autumn wreath graces our door, and pots of chrysanthemums grace the threshold. Sometimes the pots are adorned by leaves fallen from the old oak nearby and its companion maple. The oak is our guardian, the wreath and mums a nod to the season and a tribute of sorts. Oak, fallen leaves, wreath and blooms are cheerful things, conveying a benediction on anyone who knocks at the door, treads our cobblestones or just passes by in the street. Autumn images tug at the heart, and I always sort through reams of archived images looking for just the right one for today, am never sure I have found it. Leaves, asters, puddles, clouds, light, geese, herons??? It's always about the light, and autumn light is fabulous.

However, and whenever you choose to celebrate the occasion, a very happy Autumn Equinox, Harvest Home, or Mabon. May good things come to you.

Thursday Poem - Mabon, The Autumn Equinox

Ephemeral truce.

The dark begins

its long winning streak.

But for now

in this disheveled garden

a riot of blowsy flowers

hangs on like a chorus

of aging show girls

still with a few good kicks.

The air is ripe

with seedy perfume

and pleasant lies,

the pomegranate shared

between two mouths.

This is our second harvest,

the corn, the squash,

the reconstructed

memories of summer.

Ceres, comfort us with apples,

with grapes and the wine of grapes.

Wheaten breads are baked

in the shape of the sun.

We savor them

with honey.

It will be a long time

before this golden

moment comes again.

Dolores Stewart Riccio

Oh, That Harvest Moon

This moon is my favorite in the whole turning year.  It is also the one I can't describe properly or take a good photo of, no matter how extensive my preparations or ardent my intentions. Every year, I wander off to a good vantage point, set up camera, telescope and tripod, check my settings and wait patiently for night to fall. The moon rises, and I stand breathless in the dark, trying to capture her radiance with my lens and grasping a clumsy handful of words to describe the most beautiful moon of the year. Honoring this month's full moon is a personal seasonal rite, and if I had to think up a name of my own for it, that name would be "Hallelujah Moon".

It is something of a cosmic joke, my standing outside in the dark and taking photo after photo but never a good one. Another glorious Harvest Moon has just gone by, and another tottering heap of mediocre images has been captured. The whole  exercise brings to mind the Zen teaching tale in which a monk on his deathbed was asked to describe his life, and he replied blithely, "just one mistake after another..."

In the greater scheme of things, it doesn't matter how my efforts turned out - it was just being there that mattered. I was happy to be around for another harvest moon, and I hope to be around for many more such wonders. Lady Moon climbed into the sky at the appointed hour, and we (Beau and I) were there to witness her ascent. As we packed up our stuff and headed indoors, we couldn't help thinking that such splendor deserved a gesture of some kind, a chorus, a chant or a benediction - something grander, wider and more expressive than our rickety bows and contented sighs.

We also know this moon as the: Acorns Gathered Moon, All Ripe Moon, Aster Moon, Autumn Moon, Barley Moon, Berry Moon, Chrysanthemum Moon, Corn Moon, Corn Maker Moon, Dancing Moon, Deer Paw the Earth Moon, Dog Salmon Return to Earth Moon, Elderberry Moon, Drying Grass Moon, Fruit Moon, Hay Cutting Moon, Her Acorns Moon, Holy Moon, Hulling Corn Moon, Index-finger Moon, Leaf Fall Moon, Leaves Changing Color Moon, Little Chestnut Moon, Mabon Moon, Maize Moon, Mallow Blossom Moon, Moon of Falling Leaves, Moon of First Frost, Moon of Full Harvest, Moon of Much Freshness, Moon When the Leaves Fall, Moon of Plenty, Moon When the Corn Is Taken in, Moon When the Plums Are Scarlet, Moon When Deer Paw the Earth, Moon When Calves Grow Hair, Moon When Everything Ripens and Corn Is Harvested, Moose Moon, Morning Glory Moon, Mulberry Moon, Nut Moon, Papaw Moon, Rice Moon, Rudbeckia Moon, Seed Moon, Shining Leaf Moon, Silky Oak Moon, Singing Moon, Sturgeon Moon, Snow Goose Moon, Wine Moon, Wood Moon, Yellow Leaf Moon.